


Wool

by The Missus (schwarmerei1)



Series: The First Series [1]
Category: E.R.
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-20
Updated: 2012-10-20
Packaged: 2017-11-16 23:08:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/544841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schwarmerei1/pseuds/The%20Missus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kerry is forgiven, but has to come to terms with Kim’s reality<br/>Warning: Description of assault, Homophobia, Language<br/>Spoilers: Up to 7.16 “Witch Hunt”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wool

  
  


“Legaspi here.” 

Kerry’s breath caught.  Kim was answering the back line of her office phone at last.  Her pages had gone unanswered, and Kim had asked to be taken off the call list for the ER until the end of the quarter.  DeRaad, sharper than he looked, had put up no argument.

“Kim, please see me.  Can I see you? Can we talk?.”

“About what, Kerry?”  Kim’s exhaustion was obvious.  “Is there anything new to go over?”

“This is killing me, Kim.  I can’t get out of where I am.  I need to talk things through with you....  Please. “

Her voice broke, the hitch in Kerry’s breath telling Kim a story of a trapped and frightened woman who was grieving as a child does, out of control: she relented.  Her compassion for this woman, Kim’s remembrance of her initial bravery, wasn’t something she could banish.  Kim was living in her own misery, more functional than Kerry, but wounded more deeply nonetheless.  Their time together, hidden away at Kim’s house, had been the most marvelous months of Kim’s life.  

Desire aside, Kim had never responded to anyone like she had to Kerry.  She had wanted this woman to truly know her, but Kerry’s panic had made that impossible.   She had believed it possible, though, as she watched Kerry grow more trusting, more relaxed, and more visceral with her.  The sex had been better than she had ever had... Kim had never enjoyed herself more thoroughly than with Kerry.  Watching her sleep, Kim had let her mind travel years down the road, imagining waking up beside Kerry in a shared house: making love, then coffee, then love again.  She had wondered briefly, as Kerry lay sleeping on her nude belly, if she might not have the chance to be a mother after all.  She had imagined her belly swollen and firming where Kerry’s cheek had been.  

For all her fantasizing, all she had accomplished was the creation of another heartbreak at the hands of a straight girl.  Two for two, Legaspi.  Great record.

Kim was worn out.

“Fine. I’m done with patients for the day. Come up to my office, then. We’ll talk all you want to. “

“I have another hour on my shift.”

“I’m here now, Kerry.  You just get here when you want to talk to me.”

Kerry pressed her thumb into her brow ridge to stifle her response.  She had wasted her chance, she reminded herself, to have her needs be the default setting for them as a couple.

“Fine.  I’m paging Carter and Kovac, and I’m leaving now; I’ll be there in five.”

Silence on the other end brought a soft “Kim?” from her lips.  

“I’m here.  I mean... I’ll be here.” 

 “Thank you,” Kerry said.

Kerry Weaver looked like leftover death.  Nothing had broken her mood for weeks.  Her staff was edgier than ever around her: Malucci was actually afraid to sit down anywhere except at a patient’s bedside.  Her staff had noticed that her bad moods degenerated into irascibility when she was hungry, and since she couldn’t be convinced to go eat, they had taken turns bringing tempting little treats from home, strictly in the hopes that Weaver would get a few carbos into her system if the lounge, desk, and offices were full of easy-access snacks.  It hadn’t worked for Kerry, in fact she had lost enough weight to look hollow-cheeked and even smaller than she was, but the extra treats did take a little of the edge off everyone _else’s_ day.  

She had hoped beyond reason to hear from Kim in the days following her suspension, but had not.  Her calls had gone unanswered; messages ranging from a weeping, “Kim, please” to litanies of apology for everything Kerry had done that day had all gone without reply.  Kerry had scrambled, staving off depression by focusing on finding some crucial thing she hadn’t apologized for, some key element that still stood between her and Kim’s welcome.  

She desperately needed to find her way back to Kim; she had never wanted anything so much as she wanted this woman.  She had agonized over her desire when she had first recognized it.  And once they were together, Kim had guided Kerry, not into Kim’s desire, but into her own.  Kerry was still reeling from what she had been learning of herself.  And of Kim.  But more than that, she had been beginning to feel as though she could belong with Kim, as though she might have stumbled blindly across her own home, some kind of birthright.  She had lain, watching Kim sleep, and imagined her in Kerry’s own bed, living together, working together, perhaps even parenting together.... but they had never spoken deeply of these things, because Kerry could not truly comprehend her own situation.  Kim had given her all the time she could afford to give, and Kerry had used it to identify her anxieties instead of to fight them.   She wanted another chance.

Kim, bundled into her chair, nodded as Kerry related this to her as best she could.  “It’s not that I don’t understand how you felt, Kerry, or how you feel. I’ve been there; we’ve all been there in different ways.  You don’t need to explain your instincts to me, Kerry.  I don’t want to hear your apologies: I believe you,” Kim said, favoring her with an earnest expression.  “I truly do believe you, and I forgive you, I do...”

Kerry’s mangled heart lurched forward at the thought of forgiveness... ‘Please,’ she prayed inwardly, ‘I’d do anything.’   

Seeing her hopefulness inspired a flash of irritation in Kim.  She was trying to give Kerry closure, and Kerry was _still_ pursuing her.  Would she never have peace?

“...But you hurt me so deeply, Kerry.  I can’t set myself up for that kind of rejection again.  I can’t even think of what you might tell me that would make me trust you.  Your world, as you shared it with me anyway, doesn’t include the most important parts of me.  I’ve been missing from your world for longer than these past couple of weeks.”

Kim’s hurt and anger stopped Kerry in her tracks.  Her own anger surfaced to meet it.  

“What do you know about it, Kim?  You’ve been beautiful all your life, you’ve been out forever, you know how to get what you want.  People love you; people trust you with their most vulnerable thoughts.  No one who knows you could ever hate you, Kim.  Your goddamn exes are your best friends.  Your parents wanted you desperately.  You’ve never even _been_ to my world.”

Kim ‘s eyes showed her fury.  

“You _cannot_ dismiss me like that, Kerry.  I have paid for every ounce of my own courage, over and over again.  You think it’s easy to walk through the world knowing that every time you screw up a bunch of people are watching?  It’s taken me _years_ to like the way I look, Kerry: _years_.  I know people think I’m pretty, I know I would get stares from people even if they didn’t know I was queer.  At least you _know_ why they’re looking at you, Kerry; I’m some character in their sick fucking fantasies.  Motherfuckers.”

Kerry was shocked into stillness.  Kim’s eyes watered hotly... not true tears, just a smeary emotional accoutrement to her flaming cheeks and paling, trembling hands.  

_ “Do _ you want to know what coming out young is like, Kerry?  Because I’ll fucking well tell you how much fun it was... how happy I am to be all care-fucking-free and full of sisterhood pride as I must be in your version of the world, okay?”

Kerry did not make a move.  She had never seen Kim so possessed.   She feared Kim’s next words; a familiar sensation, but with new focus.  Before now, she had been waiting for rejection, expecting the slap that surely must be heading her way, sending her away, shaming her.  Right now, she feared that Kim would choke on her own words, hurt herself somehow.  Kerry wanted to see what Kim was willing to show her; an intimacy, a reality, however painful, was better than waiting and wondering.  Kim had never spoken to her in a rage before; irritation and even exasperation had crept into numerous conversations, but Kerry had never heard anything like this before.

Kim looked at her hard, searching for the slightest indication that Kerry would argue her.  ‘Don’t you dare say a word until I’m through,’ she silently warned, her expression quite clearly conveyant.  ‘Don’t you _dare_ ask one more thing of me right now.’

Kerry’s stillness convinced Kim to begin.

“My first-grade teacher used to wear the best perfume.  She was Black, and her hair oil smell mixed with her perfume....  Well, it drove me prepubescently wild.  I used to hold my breath when she walked the aisles... up and down.  I’d empty my lungs when she was behind me, then suck in a deep, full breath of her scent as she walked by.”

Kerry gave a barely perceptible smile at the image of a tiny blonde sensualist forming in the heart of middle America.  Kim saw Kerry smile, but she herself did not.  

“So she thought I had asthma.  All she heard when she was around me were those great big breaths.  I had no subtlety even as a child.”

Kerry’s small smile was real, now.  Kim twitched her mouth.  

“She sent a note home to my parents saying I needed medical help.  They asked me, of course, what the hell was going on.  I remember this so clearly.  I looked at both of them, across the dinner table.  I loved them both so much.  My father was the one who actually asked me about it, and I turned to him and said, ‘Oh, Daddy... she smells _so_ wonderful....’  They stared at me like I had a horn on my head.  They pulled me out of her class and sent me to a therapist for a couple of months.  He asked me if I liked to wear dresses and bullshit like that.  I didn’t know why I was wrong, but I knew my parents were ashamed of me.  So I was ashamed of me, too.  

“And I couldn’t help it, Kerry, any more than you can help it now.  It kept happening.  Crushes on teachers, crushes on friends.  Amorphous fantasies, images of kissing the women in movies like the heroes did.  I never told a soul.  And I thought I was so well hidden.  In junior high I used to wear my gym clothes under my jeans so I wouldn’t be naked in the locker room... I knew my body would give me away.  I made shallow friends and never let them know me.  I felt so toxic, Kerry.  Like anyone I loved would blacken and wither if they knew.  I tried to stay away from people, but in a small town, Kerry, you can’t just opt out of life.  There is nowhere to disappear, and even when nobody _knows_ you, they damn sure know when you’re different.” 

Kerry’s eyes were locked on Kim’s, softening as Kim’s hardened.  It was all she could do to keep from touching her, all she could do to stop herself from cooing some comforting nothing; she was gathering the sense that Kim’s story might be a very painful one.  Kim had never sat down and told her anything from start to finish.  Kim had never silenced her, never used those hands to forbid her anything.  She felt no small amount of dread.  

“In high school, I fell hopelessly in love.  Not a crush, not just a girly thing, Kerry.  I fell flat on my ass in love.  I was a junior and she was a senior and I never told her a word about it.  I followed her everywhere.  She wanted to be an actress.  She was beautiful, Kerry... just stunning.  And she had talent, besides.  She was in every school play, every club, every show.  I signed up to learn stage lighting just to be working near her.  I worshipped her.”

Kim’s voice was softer, rolling over her memory of her first deep love.  Kerry swallowed.

“People teased her about me.  She had a boyfriend, of course, always had a boyfriend.  But we went out, too, just the two of us.  She wanted to study with me, or we would work on projects together.  She used to try out hairstyles on me... braid my hair up in all kinds of funky ways.  We’d shop.  She spent the night sometimes.  I always slept on the floor. I couldn’t stand to think I might touch her, taint her with me.  

“One night she did up all my hair in thick plaits, then decided she didn’t like it that way, and undid them one by one.  Like it was nothing.  Normal.  Mundane.  ‘I love your hair,’ she said.  She was sitting behind me, idly touching it.  And my neck.  And I came right then and there; I came from her hands in my hair and her fingertips on the nape of my neck.   I don’t think she knew, but I was terrified.  She got up.  I got up.  We went into my living room and we finished our analytic geometry.  And then we went up to my room, and she got in my bed.  And I lay on my floor.  And I cried.  ‘I’m so lonely,’ I whispered.  And she got out of bed, and she came to me there, and she put her arms around me.  She tilted my face up to hers, and she said, ‘I know this great guy who would just adore you, Kimmy.  The four of us could go out this weekend.  You don’t have to be lonely, Kimmy.  You’re a great girl.’ “

Kerry flinched visibly, stung on Kim’s behalf.

“Yeah,” Kim said, “ _exactly_.”  

She cocked an eyebrow at Kerry, who wisely said nothing out loud.  Kim continued.  

“I felt both my eyes dry up so fast I thought I might never weep again.  She sucked the life right out of me, the will, the hope, everything.  It was probably merciful, all things considering.  I wouldn’t have survived what happened later if I hadn’t been well on my way to being a hard-ass.”

Kerry waited.

“She went to college.  I heard from her twice.  She sent me a wedding invitation, years later.  She never even knew.

“But everybody else sure seemed to.  I was a marked woman my senior year.  Different.  People were beginning to put a label on it... ‘Lay-gas-pee’s a virgin.’  ‘Too good for me, Legs?’  Clever shit like that.  And cold shoulders from the girls... of course.  I gave up theater tech because I couldn’t stand to be in that space anymore.  I kept totally to myself and worked my ass off to get a scholarship so I could get the hell away from there.  My parents were happy with my schoolwork.  My mom kept begging me to find a date for the prom.  My dad _never_ brought up the subject of boys.   I felt nothing.  I made myself feel nothing most of the time.  I was fine; I left well enough alone.  

“But it was like they could smell it on me, Kerry.  I was smart, I was aloof, I guess I was pretty enough, I don’t know... A guy I knew from English class asked me out, anyway, in front of his friends.  And I didn’t know what to do.  I just stammered something about no but thank you, and he said, really loudly, ‘So is it just me, or is it all the guys?’  And I felt the world get very, very small, Kerry: I couldn’t say a word.  He laughed, and his buddies laughed, and I thought that was the end of it.  I started to dress baggier and sloppier.  I hated how people looked at me.  I hated my body, I hated my face.  I hated how tall I was, how bony.  I would have broken your heart, Kerry, I would have broken your heart.”  

“You already have, tender girl,” Kerry thought to herself.  She could see that child in Kim even now.

“So when I found myself in the throes of attraction again, a transfer student from the East somewhere... I just lost it.  I started staying up late, started drinking.  I started running track just to let off the steam.  My mother was finally happy with me... she thought I was going to try out for the team or something.  Ha.  I spent my Saturdays at school, hanging out on the oval, worrying, doing laps, sitting in the stands with my head in my hands.  I was lost, I suppose....” 

She paused, glancing at Kerry, who shifted carefully and deliberately to a more comfortable position, but still on the far end of her office couch.  Kim was satisfied that Kerry was not about to cross into her space.

“And one Saturday, the boys from my English class were there too.”

Kerry recoiled from the sudden bile in Kim’s voice, and instinctively searched her face for clues.  Afraid that she was about to hear something she could not bear to imagine, her mind flipped quickly through a career’s worth of ER stories that began with a phrase or a tone like that, and ended with Dr. Weaver’s tenderest suturing skills and a set of forensic polaroids.

“The guy who had asked me out came up from the group to me.  ‘If it isn’t Legs,’ he croaked.   I got up to go, but he moved in front of me, reaching out like he was going to touch my hair.  ‘You know, _Miss_ Kimberly, you are just too pretty to turn out to be a dyke.  You should give me a chance to change your mind.’  ‘Fuck you,’ I said.  ‘ _Fuck you!_ ’  Something in me just snapped when I realized how scared I was of him.  I swore at him like I had never sworn in my life.   His friends were laughing, loving the show.  He was grinning like an idiot.  He _was_ an idiot.  He baited me again.  ‘So you _are_ a dyke, right?  Wish you had a dick, little girl?’  I was afraid and he knew it, and it got worse and worse. ‘Hungry for some cootchie, Kimmy?  Little snatch, is it gonna be?’  He kept getting in front of me, getting closer and closer.  He was trying to get me to cry, I think.  Maybe I should have.”

Kerry’s heart was racing.  She chanted to herself, ‘Her body’s not scarred, you’ve seen her, you’ve touched her, you’ve felt her respond to you... her sweet tender body is not scarred... she was okay, she is okay, she ended up okay....’  She tasted iron and acid in her throat.

“The guys were having a ball....  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘seein’ as how you’re wanna be a big ol’ dyke, Kimmy, you might as well look like one.  Right, fellas?’  I turned my back on him, thinking I’d climb the fence, but he grabbed me.  Like I was nothing.  Weightless.  He sat me down hard on the bench, and called his buddies over.  I knew them all from school.”

Kim’s voice never broke once as she told Kerry how they had held her down, mincing and prancing the gay male stereotype while her tormenter took handfuls of her hair and clipped them off close to her scalp, shearing her, shaming her, exposing her.  She had given up resisting halfway through, defeated. 

“ ‘You look just like my brother,’ somebody said.  ‘Better stay away from my girl, butch,’ another called as they left. ”

Kerry was frankly crying now... tears coursing down her face, but she held herself still, trying to convey her respect, trying to choose the right way to handle Kim like the wounded woman that she was.  Kim, as moved by Kerry’s careful attentiveness as by her frank emotional response, could not look her in the eye, and for the first time, Kerry was grateful for that. 

“I went home.  I left my hair where it blew, all over the first couple rows of the bleachers.  I walked all the way home.  I left my bike there by the track.  My parents were frantic by the time I got home... it was late, I’d missed supper.  I showed up ashen, grass-stained, with a weed-whacker haircut.  My mother screamed; I’m sure she thought I’d been raped.”  

‘You were, my baby,’ Kerry’s burning heart prayed toward her.  ‘You surely were.’ 

“I’d never seen my father so angry.  He would have shot them between the eyes, I knew.  I loved him so much at that second that I ran to him, just ran to him, and wept like I would die in the morning.  He was like stone, Kerry... cold and hard and furious.  My mother drove to the school and picked up my bike.  She came home with a piece of my hair in her hands.  She offered it to my father, but he didn’t want to touch it.  My mother went out of the room, twisting that dead thing in her hands, and to this day I don’t know what she did with that chunk of hair.  It looked like pale wool in her hands...lifeless, used up.  

“My father went upstairs and called me after him.  He sat me down on a stool in the bathroom, and he trimmed my hair with his shaving kit.  I remember how big his hands felt on me, carefully going over and over everywhere those boys had been, smoothing the roughest parts, leaving it as long as he could, where he could.  ‘It will all grow out by Christmas, Kimber,’ he said.  My baby name.  ‘Hair grows even faster when you cut it.’  He kept talking the whole time.  I rested my head on the edge of the sink while he worked my hair into a recognizable shape.  ‘You have your mother’s hair,’ he mused, absently.  ‘Hers was short when I married her.’ ”

Kim smiled briefly at the remembrance.  ‘You have your father’s hands,’ Kerry thought, oddly proud.

“He held my head easily... my father’s hands were huge, Kerry, huge and warm and loving.  He left me there to shower, and he must have said something to my mother that night, because when I went downstairs in the morning for breakfast we all acted like everything was fine.  I brought a hat with me to school, but I by the time I got to campus I had decided not to put it on.  

“I spent that week ignoring stares, ignoring whispers, ignoring even the sweetest teacher’s questioning expression.  I just pretended that everything was fine, that if I were to put up my hand I’d feel my hair there.  Like everyone else had some kind of problem.  And after a week of pretending that as hard as I could, it began to be true.  ‘Everything is fine, nothing is wrong with me, I was not hurt.  I am not hurt.  I am not ugly.  I am not ashamed.’  I told myself these things over and over and over until they sounded true enough.”  

Kerry flashed on a cherished image of her Kim, proud and peaceful and warm in her bed.  ‘I have to dry my hair,’ she had lifted her head to declare.  Her open expression that morning burned doubly hard into Kerry’s memory consciousness... how much more than simple intimate pleasure had suffused Kim’s gaze that morning?  With whom had Kerry felt so resonant? 

Kim turned to look at Kerry, and her glance this time included the tiny woman with regard.  She spoke to her directly, eyes on eyes.  

“I hate being hated.  I hate being some fucking object in the fantasies of my acquaintances.  I hate being the first one sold out and the last one chosen.  But I can deal with that, and, as it happens, I deal with it goddamned well.  

“And I love being a lesbian, Kerry.  I love how I feel for the women I love.  I love who I am.  I love who I was, too.  I feel like I’ve been granted two lifetimes, sometimes.  My younger years seem like they happened to someone else, someone I knew very well, but who wasn’t me.  I know in my soul I belong in this world, and I love my talents for the work they let me do, and the pleasures they give me.  And I love where I am in the world right now.”  

Kim wiped her eyes.  “But you have to know that I’m not just breezing through that world, Kerry, letting it happen to me.  I didn’t have two lifetimes, I’m having one, and I am obligated to watch out for myself.   I’m grateful that I have it in me to love you like I do.”

Utterly open to Kim, that simple phrase pierced Kerry to the marrow.  Kim saw her pupils flicker, saw the grief flash over her face.

“I’m grateful for your love.  But I won’t be a character in your life, Kerry.  I won’t have you ashamed of me, and I won’t just let you near to where I hurt right now.  When you decide if you really want me, you can just come find me there.” 

Kim sounded more bitter than she meant to, she knew.  But she had been cut to the quick by Kerry’s rejection, and as much as she suffered without her, Kim preferred acute pain to chronic.  Her nerves showed through in the tremble of her hands: raw, hypersensitive, cold.  Kerry forced herself not to try to touch her, forced her breathing into an even pattern.

Kerry’s composure fully conveyed her compassion, her gratitude to Kim.  It belied the power of her feelings for this woman, this woman who responded bodily to Kerry’s emotions but feared her inconstancy .  Kerry pulled herself up to her fullest height, and faced Kim with a calm, sure gaze.  She willed herself to ground this woman, incorporate this woman, gather her story into the folds of her mind.  ‘I know that place, Kim, and I swear I will find you there,’ she promised herself. ‘I will sleep on your floor until you ask for me.’   

To Kim, she said only, “Thank you.”  



End file.
